


Veridis Quo

by Aicosu



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Grand Admiral Hux, Hux as a Father, M/M, Multi, POV Child, Parent-Child Relationship, Reylux - Freeform, Reylux kid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-16 12:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7269001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aicosu/pseuds/Aicosu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Rey and Kylo Ren have to go on a mission alone, they ask Hux to keep their son safe. The two have a hard time bonding after having been apart for three years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work is for the Reylux fam. Thanks so much for all the inspiration! Special thanks to brittlelimbs for letting me use Silas!

His mother’s hair smells like dirt.

Silas crinkles his nose despite his fingers, they delve into the locks and curl tightly.

It's a good dirt. The dirt from back home, where he often watches her rip roots and cut greens. The dirt he uses to shove ship models into, just to scavenge them out again with her later. She never complained about that, even though he knew it ruined her seedlings.

“It’s not so long, really it isn’t.” She’s saying. “We’ll be back to get you and bring you with us to the new bases in two months.”

“Rey.” His papa warns, looming over both of them.

“I want you to know that we’re coming back. And if we don’t, somehow, that we meant to. That we always mean to. Even if we die or--”

“Rey, please. You have to stop talking about death.”

His papa’s eyes are dark, but warm, like they are when he stops at Silas’ room and says his soft goodnights. _‘See you in the morning.’_

Except he wouldn’t now.

“I have a comm and your papa has a comm. You can send messages or uplink us--remember that code I taught you?”

“Yes, mama.”

“Rey, come on, set him down.”

“Wait, just a little longer--” Rey protests, and she pulls him away from where his papa tries to take him from her arms. Silas dips his head back into her hair, smells the dirt there and closes his eyes, wanting to dig himself for her to scavenge out again and again, so she’d never be far.

But his papa insists. His great hands slide over Silas’ ribs, pulling him firmly from the garden, from home. An arm props him up beneath his knees, but he isn’t set down like he thought he would be. Instead his papa winds long arms around to hold him just like his mother had.

“You’ll be okay.” His papa whispers. A spell, an incantation pressed upon his forehead. Silas wraps his fingers on his papa’s shoulders and tries to feel the Force, wondering if his papa was using it to make the words true.

He finds it, from both of them, alighting their little circle of robes and clutching hands with warmth. Its a buzzing, a nice blanket, the sweet singsong of birds in the morning outside their home. Silas thinks he can see the halo of it around his papa’s ears, or in the curls of his mother’s hair.

“Hux is here.” His mother announces. The three turn to attention, and the singsong is gone.

Silas understands that Hux is name. A name for this black obelisk of a man. But it seems like a title. A noun. A Hux.

He walks the length of the spaceport to them with the presence of a cloud. And in Silas mind he is a cloud. A dark storm come to rain on his world. For two months. Hux.

Hux kisses his mother first. It’s jarring. Silas hasn’t seen them kiss in a long time. Not since his 3rd birthday, hasn’t seen Hux since then either. His mother’s head is tilted upward, black fingers yanking sunlight itself to and fro, before drinking from it. It’s short, but hurried. It’s been a long time.

“Your hair is longer.” Hux says, looking upset as his eyes flicker wildly about her face. His mother smiles, and her fingers touch the freckles on Hux’s face. Hux’s hair and skin gleam like papa’s saber was too close to his throat, red and gold and white.

“Yours isn’t.” His papa calls over his head. The words crack. The heavy vibration from the chest beneath Silas’ fingers quivers. He twists in his papa's hands to see his eyes gleaming, blinking.

Silas wants to ask if papa is crying, but doesn’t get the chance when Hux is suddenly there, crowding him, kissing his papa like he had his mother. Except now Hux drinks from the moon; his papa is white and grey, blacks and charcoals, colorless.

They part and Silas stares. Watches as his papa nods, tears kept, content.

And then Hux looks at him.

There’s things there that Silas remembers; pale gold feathers for eyelashes, small blank stone irises, and a tight non-smile. But there’s more that he doesn’t remember. The set of his broad shoulders. The straightness of his brow. The unsure and reproachful near-glare.

“...’lo.”

It’s all Silas can manage and he feels a bit angry for being so little. But Hux is the rain, come to wash away his summers and flood his mother’s garden. There will be no playing with Hux, no bedtime goodnights and see-you-in-the-mornings.

“Hello.” It’s all Hux manages either.

“He has what he needs?” He asks his papa instead.

His papa nods, and Silas is lowered to the ground, his shoes clack before shiny military boots and he has to look up to keep his eye on the fiery red at the top of the black shadow that is Hux.

“Rey packed most of his favorite things--”

“He has a few datapads in there to keep him occupied.” His mother interjects, her hands finding Silas’ shoulders and pinching him close to her legs. “And some food for the jump. There’s clothes and trinkets, but he knows what to do with all that. He can do everything himself.”

“You don’t have to worry about taking him places, Hux, just make sure he’s safe--”

“Don’t.” Hux snaps at his papa. A crack of lightning in the storm. Silas can almost feel his shoes soak through. “I don’t need to be told.”

His papa says goodbye first with another spelled weaved incantation; ‘you’ll be okay,’ a squeeze that hurts his ribs so much he whines in his papa’s ear, and a kiss to his forehead. Then his papa storms off fast, long legs and robes carrying him away quickly so he cannot turn back.

Silas watches his papa hurry away as his mother hugs him again and again, kisses him again and again, tells him how smart he his, how beautiful, how strong. “We’re coming back no matter what. And if we don’t, we wanted to, do you understand?” He doesn’t, but he nods to make her smile, nods to stop her from crying so he doesn’t cry. He’s bigger than that. He’s six.

Her fingers grab at his tunic, his shoulders, his cheeks. She’s looking at his face like something of it might change.

“Be good for your father, okay?”

_Father._

Silas looks up to Hux, standing just behind him, staring down at his Mother like he was watching the sun die out.

_Father._

“Yes, mama.”

She kisses his cheeks, his hands, his fingers, and leaves.

Silas stay where they leave him, watching until he can’t see their robes anymore through the halls of the spaceport. When Hux tells him it’s time to leave, Silas nods, but doesn’t move. He almost thinks it has already started raining when he feels the tears on his cheeks pat down to his tunic.

And then there's a cold grasp on his shoulders, a woosh of freezing air from black wool, and he is propped into Hux’s arms.

His fingers wrap around the fire of Hux’s hair instinctively, to busy crying to care that he doesn’t remember the right size or shape his arms should be around this man. This Hux.

Hux doesn’t coo him. Doesn’t kiss his face or whisper secret praise to him. He doesn’t squeeze his ribs or rub his back.

Hux’s hair smells like nothing Silas can recognize.

 

* * *

 

He makes his first mistake on the ship.

His mother had always taught him to do everything himself. He carries his own pack, puts on his own coat, checks to make sure his shoes are snug, turns the channel on his comm.

Silas is supposed to count the exits on the ship too. His mother always makes sure he does so. Just in case. But the ship Hux brings him to is too big. Bigger than any he had been on. Maybe even bigger than he’d ever seen.

There’s a lot of people too. Soldiers. Troopers. People in clothes that look like Hux’s. Black and black and more black. They wear hats and walk funny, in formation. He keeps his hands looped around Hux, and lowers his face into his shoulder.

Hux talks, Silas can felt it through their chests. It’s different than the deep vibrations of his papa. It’s sharp, fast, clipped and clean.

“I want all men on post by the time I reach the Bridge. We are to lift on my command.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Silas isn’t introduced to any of these people. He watches them come and go, making salutes that Hux doesn’t look at. Sometimes they follow behind them, staring oddly at Silas like he’s an alien or a ghost. Like he’s not supposed to be there.

He isn’t.

They walk a long time and they pass doors and doors and doors. Silas stops counting at 32 doors, because he can’t keep up and his breathing has gone bad. His mother would be cross with him if he didn’t know, so he tries to remember the books of ships she had shown him, tries to think of the shape of this ship and what it might be called. But he can’t remember, and his breathing grows harsher, little chest heaving against Hux as they walk out onto the bridge.

“Admiral on deck!”

“Admiral Hux, sir.”

Hux sets him down in the center platform as people cluster about. There’s lots of talking, shouting, lights blinking and people staring.

Silas watches Hux’s boots walk away from him towards the viewport. And Silas stands there, heaving, because he wasn’t told to sit or go away, or follow, he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do, if he should buckle up, or leave, and he hasn’t remembered all the doors yet--

“Retract and prepare launch. Set coordinates for Imperial Space. Sector 322.”

“Sir!”

“Retracting now.”

“Setting coordinates for home space, Admiral.”

Silas can see all of space, right there, swallowing up Hux while he stares out the viewport. It’s large, massive, and he thinks wildly that mama and papa are out there, gone. Lost in the tiny prickling dots of light and dust. A burning sets in his stomach. Mad. He thinks of his papa, of how his papa sometimes feels. He’s mad. Because he doesn’t know how many doors, how many exits, he doesn’t know the ship or the name or the model and the--

“HUX!” His little voice screeches past the blinking, whirring thrums of the entire bridge and everything seems to stop.

Everyone’s staring. The officers in their funny hats. The troopers. The stars beyond.

The entire ship stops for him and his little yell.

The slick red hair is the only thing Silas stares at, even as his vision blurs with tears.

When Hux turns to look at him, Silas knows he’s made a mistake. He did something wrong, he’s not sure what, but he’s sure he did. Because Hux looks surprised and upset. Hurt. Hurt like mama is when he screams and shouts and hits things. Like papa is when he screams and shouts and hits things too.

Hux’s face is, for the first time, melted. It’s pale and red rimmed and sad, brows turned down and eyes glassy.

But then it isn’t. It’s a statue again. Hux stalks back toward him, steps fast and loud, clacking through the entire bridge and Silas knows he must be in trouble. He shouldn’t have called out, shouldn’t have yelled.

Silas stares at Hux as he sniffs, unable to look away from the once more expressionless sculpture of a face. When Hux raises a hand, Silas cringes terribly, thinking he will be struck for calling out. For being mad.

The hand falls away before touching him.

“What is it?”

The silence stretches onward but everyone waits. No one hurries him as his fists curl at his sides and his eyes blink back tears to see Hux properly.

“H-How how many e-exits…”

Hux waits patiently for the question.

“...on-on the s-ship?”

“There are 1,000 potential exits, and almost 6,000 escape pods. There are several different military class ships to exit 21 different docking bays.”

“One thousand, six thousand, twenty one?”

“Yes.”

Silas repeats the number under his breath, nodding as if he could see each and every one in his mind, understanding. Hux nods too and turns, but this time he doesn’t walk away. He stays close to Silas, shiny boots spread in a perfect plant, hands behind his back.

“Resume coordinates, launch when docking shield lifts.”

Everyone starts moving again.

_One thousand, six thousand, twenty-one, one thousand, six thousand, twenty-one…_

Silas doesn’t ask any more questions on the bridge. He doesn’t want to make a mistake again.

 

* * *

 

He talks to his mother the next morning.

“Droids! How many droids?”

“Um.. 15.”

“That’s so many!”

“Yes, mama.”

Silas curls his legs into his hips, grabs at his toes and wriggles into the linens of the cot. He stares down at the comm, watching the line of static jump with the sound of his mother’s voice.

“Did your father tell you what they were for?”

Silas thinks of his papa first, before forcefully thinking of Hux. She means Hux.

“No.”

“No? Why not?”

He shrugs. He thinks of Hux again, the raining storm, the cloud that made everyone in the ship talk or be silent. He’s forgotten the question already and he’s forgotten that she can’t see him when he shrugs his shoulders.

“Silas?”

He blinks around the room as he tries to remember.

The only exit here is to the small silver hallway that leads to the fresher and to Hux’s room, where he has not been. His own room is enough. He knows how to make his own bed, how to work his own comm and uplink. He doesn’t need Hux for that.

He even unpacked himself, put the datapads on the shelves like his room at home and placed the model ships on the desk near his bed.

There’s a dusty stack of velvet cases there too, full of silver coins that shimmer. Silas doesn’t know what they’re for, so he leaves them alone.

“Silas? How are you and your father?”

“Hux is working.”

His momma goes quiet and he counts his toes until she speaks again.

“I see. Well there’s lots for you to do there. Papa used to live there with your father you know.”

“I know.”

When she clicks off it’s only after she presses kisses to the comm. Silas watches the static spark with each loud smack of her lips.

* * *

 

He makes his second mistake days later.

Silas is either in his room alone, or with Hux wherever he goes. He has not been told to go play somewhere else, and he doesn’t ask to.

Most days they are on the bridge, where Silas stands quietly and watches everyone shout or click clack on screens and terminals. He doesn’t bother Hux then. They don’t talk. No one else talks to Silas either.

But on some days, Hux wears white.

They walk a lot when he wears white. They walk the whole ship maybe, Silas following close as Hux’s cape snaps here and there and people wind up like protocol droids as he passes. They walk through the ship's hallways, corridors and docking bays. Silas sees all 21 ports, and nearly all the ships that sit in them.

Once, Hux had stopped them before a railing, overlooking a bay with bunches of ships, and troopers scattering like ants. Silas had watched people stop to stare up at them, clacking boots to attention in salute.

Hux had talked then, not moving his head or looking at him, but speaking.

“This is the forward battalion of the First Order. First responders.”

Silas had waited to hear more, even if he hadn’t understood, but Hux had not continued. Maybe he hadn’t been talking to him in the first place.

The mistake came that day, when they had walked the rest of the ship to sit in a big room with a big desk and many other people in black uniforms and hats. He had sat beside Hux, near the top of the table, while the rest of the seats filled and people began talking. They talked about ships and people. Space. Planets. All sorts of things.

But they also stare. Silas found eyes looking at him when they weren’t talking themselves and even though his momma and papa had always told him not to, he slipped.

His warmth pressed forward, his Force, tumbling from his curiosity and dipping to touch into minds, to see behind the eyes that stared at him.

_Clone?_

It was the first word that came to him. Swirling up from the curious gaze of a man in uniform with grey hair.

_The boy looks like him...maybe, but he also doesn’t._

Silas looked away to a woman with trooper armor protecting her arms and chest, and an officer taking notes beside her.

_Jedi Affair. Surrogate. Heir. Controversy with the Senate._

_He must be his. He must be the Knight of Rens. The Savior girl of the Republic had him in agreement. The price of war. Legacy._

_Look at his face. Skywalker. Hux._

Silas slipped too much then, tensing in his seat as his mind blanked to make room for others, swallowing up their curiosity, their wondering, and replacing it with his own confusion.

_But he doesn’t call him father. Hasn’t been seen before. Clone. Force magic. Scandal._

His curiosity grew too much. He should have stopped, heeded his mother’s warnings about dipping into pools of the mind he had not asked to be in.

Because then he had turned to Hux beside him, the shadow of white and fire, and _dipped._

_No._

Silas felt his mind hit ice, a cold sharp snap that made his feet shiver in his socks and shoes.

Hux turned his chin a fraction and the stone eyes gleamed at him, stilled his soul.

_No, Silas._

He dropped the Force then, like a hot rock in the summer. The fingers of his mind were scalded, frostbitten, burned from the strange feeling of Hux and Hux feeling him back.

 

* * *

 

“Papa how come you used to live here?”

The static line was straight. Silent.

It often was when papa spoke. Because papa didn’t speak much.

“Mama says it’s because you worked here for war.”

Papa sighs. “She shouldn’t be telling you that.”

This is not the first time this has been said. Mama is often in trouble for telling him ‘everything.’ She had told him about what happened to his grandfather. About the war and the people who died there. About death. About being hungry.

“Then how come?”

“She’s right. I lived there for war.”

“With Hux?”

The line goes straight and Silas stares at it as he sits at his desk, flipping the nose of his x-wing model with his finger.

“Why are you calling him Hux?”

Silas doesn’t understand the question. He shrugs. His father seems to see it somehow.

“He’s your father.”

“...everybody calls him Hux.”

Hux. A Hux. A noun. The sound military boots make when they clack together in salute. The time inbetween an order and its response, when the terminals flicker and everyone holds their breath. The shape a white cape swirls into when it turns into a corner on patrol. A Hux.

“You are the only one who doesn’t have to, Silas.”

* * *

 

One night he sneaks into the fresher.

Silas lets the bright fluorescent lights spark on and burn his reflection into the mirror. The torches of plastisteel make stars in his eyes.

His fingers push at his skin, his cheeks, his hair. Everyone always said he looked like his papa and mama.

His papa’s hair is long and dark, ink and night. A lush of smoke clouding and swirling like the Force inside him.

Silas’ has his mother’s hair then. It’s shiny, brown. Sort of. Not quite dark. It’s sand on a foggy day by their little house. The mud after the night’s dew. His fingers pull through it, watching locks fold and bounce out. It shines red-white at the base of his scalp, like silver threads in a uniform. Secret and hidden, holding him together.

He has marks on his face. Like his papa. Small dark specks of space. But where his papa is pale and stippled carefully by these marks, his face his full of them. Freckled. They are light, but there. He has to lean into the mirror close to see them all, but they are there.

They’re on his arms too. Freckles trailing up paper skin. He rolls down his sleeves to watch them scatter up his elbow.

His mother doesn’t have them.

His skin is tan like hers though, but then he remember how he crisps in the summer in their garden, letting his back sweat with hers as they dig together and laugh. So maybe it isn’t.

His eyes aren’t a color. They aren’t dark like his father. Aren’t flashing gold like his mother. They’re grey. Like...

But his ears are big and his nose is big. Big like his papa. It’s undeniable. He pushes his fingers to the flaps on the side of his head, pulls at the lobes reassuringly.

Silas is leaning into the mirror, pressing a finger in between his eyelashes to see how gold they are, when he hears a soft thud from down the hall and scares himself back into his room.

 

* * *

 

Hux visits his room for the first time after that.

Silas shoots up to stand straight when he comes in, all black and crisp, interrupting the white and blue of the room. Of the quiet play Silas was having with the ships on his bed.

He almost snaps his shoes together on the floor and salutes.

But Hux doesn’t look at him.

Hux places gloveless hands tightly together behind his back and looks around. The walls are empty, but Hux looks anyway, twisting in the small space and pacing strangely. Silas thinks maybe it’s an inspection. A test.

But then Hux drops his hands, his shoulders, and looks to Silas with a smile.

The change is so fast, so strange, that he doesn’t smile back.

“I... put these here for you.”

A finger points to the velvet cases, the dusty ones full of coins.

“They were mine when I was young. Like you.”

Silas rubs his elbow and considers the cases again. Hux slides one out, opens it to let the coins glimmer, each one carefully turned face up and slotted.

“What did you do with them?”

Hux taps the first three. “I collected them.”

“Why?”

It’s the wrong question because Hux’s strange smile disappears into a deep frown. Colorless eyes flicker low, half-lidded, and his finger trails away from the coins. The velvet case closes.

“To have.” Hux leaves them there then, takes a step backward, considers the room again. Hux stares at the model ships on the bed. “They’re for you to have. To play with.”

“Thank you, Hux.” Silas says politely, even if he isn’t sure how to play with coins.

Hux’s gloveless hands spread on his uniform at the sides, he’s leaving now, not looking at him as the door whooshes open once more. Hurries away.

“You're welcome.”

 

* * *

 

After the first three weeks, he can’t comm mama and papa anymore.

They’re leaving gridded space and the static is so bad that he barely hears his father’s garbled goodbyes and ‘ _you’ll be okay_ ’ spells.

They have to leave too. Hux tells him they need to go planetside. Arkanis. And they have to be in uniform.

So he stands in Hux’s room, on a short stool in front of real glass, arms out, as Hux affixes red to his shoulders that's gilded in metal. It’s heavy.

Someone else had done it for Hux while he’d waited. A few people in uniform, rippling the fabric, plating the laurels, braiding the trim dangling from Hux’s sharp shoulders. But Hux had ordered them to stand aside while he made up Silas himself, refusing the small suggestion of help.

He’s pinning the red down beneath Silas’ collar when he speaks.

“You’re tall for your age. Do you know that?”

Silas shakes his head.

“So was Ren when he was young like you.”

Ren. He knows it means his papa. A title of some kind. Like Hux. But it’s said like a name, knowing and soft.

“I think you’ll be a very tall man, Silas.”

“Tall like you?” He asks quickly. Because Hux is speaking, and he almost never does-- and Hux is very tall. With freckles like him, and hair like him, and eyes like him--

Hux’s fingers still on the pin, freezing. And slowly, Silas watches him smile. It’s tight, and Hux doesn’t look into his eyes when he does it, but it’s there, the curl of the corners of his mouth.

“Yes. Taller even, I should think.”

Then Hux’s cold, frostbitten hand runs through Silas’ hair. Pushes it back. It’s faster than the way papa and mama do it. But more careful, soft, and when the hands pass over his temples, Hux pulls at Silas’ ear.

“Stay close to me, now.”

They go planetside, dressed in whites and reds. Both clinking quietly from the matching metal on their shoulders and collars.

When Silas packs his bag with clothes and model ships, he shoves in the velvet case of coins too and brings it with him.

 

* * *

 

He makes his final mistake there.

Arkanis rains and rains and rains. It is grey when they first arrive. Grey and flooded. It makes Hux look like the great storm cloud Silas had thought he was. White billows in winds about them, cape cracking like thunder. Hux is the roiling sky.

But he supposes he is too now. His brown robes are folded neatly into his pack, and white and red whip about his neck too. Swishing and snapping. A great storm cloud. A Hux. Bringing rain.

People line the stones to see them, to yell. Silas can’t hear anything they say over the rain though, nor can he see over the height of Hux, or the hundreds of troopers that march outside of them. So he keeps close, like he was asked, and counts Hux’s footsteps instead of exit doors.

The great metal slab they go home to looks like a temple, but it’s not. It’s full of people. Like the ship they were on, there’s more soldiers here. But aliens too, and droids. He tries to remember the neat ones to tell his mamma about later.

Hux talks a lot more here than before. Silas is sleepy from all the moving and walking and rain, but they walk slowly through the great building with the hundreds of troopers, as Hux talks to aliens and soldiers and people. Smiling, shaking hands, bowing.

He’s not introduced to anyone and no one talks to him. Silas doesn’t dip into any minds.

So he’s not sure how he makes another mistake.

He isn’t sure what’s being talked about as he raises his head to the ceilings. Transparisteel gleams above him with millions of droplets of rain that echo rings and shower the building.

He’s so busy with the sight of the rain above them, he doesn’t feel Hux take his hand, doesn’t feel Hux tense beside him, or the troopers all shift position.

And then the clicking grows louder.

Silas finds Hux talking to a Geonosian.

It clicks and whirrs, mandibles flaying and wings vibrating. Angry maybe.

Silas doesn’t know Geonosian. And he hasn’t used the Force to understand language like his mama and papa do. So he watches, his gold tassels and metal chiming when he cringes as the alien snaps a cane to the ground.

Everything seems quiet except for the Geonosian, everyone’s stopped talking. The rain has stopped pouring.

The storm is quiet.

The Geonosian keeps clicking, mouth splitting to spit anger at Hux.

Hux is marble. Thunder and ice. Patient.

But then the Geonosian looks down at Silas, long alien snout sneering.

Silas’ eyes go wide, surprised to suddenly be in trouble. He hadn’t spoken-- hadn’t slipped-- hadn’t done something wrong or--

The Geonosian’s cane and body flicker at him, open mouth, snapping.

“Father--!”

A cold hand wraps about his head, his ears, pulling him with a freezing wind into white and red wools. His face digs into the safety of the cloak even as blaster fire erupts from above him.

His father shoots the Geonosian in the head, exploding guts and mucus onto Arkanis’ charcoal floors. The heat sink keeps popping and Silas shakes with each bolt as they bury into the already rotted body on the floor. Soldiers and troopers spread into the crowds. People scatter and scream and then his father is yelling, bellowing thunder and lightening around them.

“Death to any who dare threaten my son! Never touch my boy!”

The blaster drops and Silas’ fingers clutch his father’s cloak and uniform as he begins crying.

Hux lifts him as easily and as fast as he had pulled his gun. Settling him into his neck and arms.

Silas wraps his arms perfectly around his father’s head, smelling rain and thunderclouds in his red hair. Hair like his.

“Father, father--”

“Hush, my boy, I have you. I have you.”

 

* * *

 

Silas unpacks his bag in his father’s room. He spread his model ships on the bed, dumping the wreckage and burying them to scavenge out like he does in his mother’s garden. Except now they’re in oceans, flooded waters and rain.

Hux drags fingers through Silas’ hair and pulls at his big ears. Ears like his papa. He smiles.

They walk Arkanis together, silently. Sometimes Hux will point out squadrons of soldiers and tell Silas what they do. Even later Silas will ask questions. How many soldiers in a squadron, how many ships on the planet, which ones did Hux like best?

At meetings Hux lets Silas bring his coins, where he would spread them on the table and create star maps, placing each different coin from each planet in the right spot. If it went long, Hux would sometimes help him stack sectors together or balance the money on its side to topple into galaxies. They were never in trouble for not listening as they played and people talked.

And at night Silas would sit in Hux’s lap in the dark of his office. Where their pale freckled faces, illuminated by the comm, waited through the static for the voices of mama and papa.  
  
When the rain does finally stop, and the floods recede, Silas stands with Hux in black again and waits for the robes to appear on the docking bay.

Mama hugs him, kissing him again and again, while his papa kisses Hux, pouring moonlight into fire. Silas feels warmth in the four of them, sees the Force in halos around their hands as they grab and hold and kiss. In his mother's hair, his papa's ears, and in his father's eyelashes.

And he cries when it's time to go.

Silas buries his face in crisp cold black that smells of rain. He wishes for the floods to take his mother’s garden. Wishes to be a Hux.

“I have you.” His father says, not unlike his papa’s whispered spells. “My boy.”

 


	2. Avril 14th

Rey won’t name the boy.

Bloodied and crying, wet and new. Fresh. Loud. Alive. The baby is lifted, skin shining with his open, screaming mouth and Hux watches Rey turn away from it all.

Ren takes him instead, brushes large gentle hands over a shaking life with the care only a man whose known love can. He leaves, not another word between the three of them. _Four of them._

Hux watches the two go. Revels in the silence that had abandoned them for hours. Rey is breathing harshly, sweat-matted, tired, angry. It’s not gone well. It hadn’t for months and months and months. And she’s tired now. Hux can see the dust of Jakku on her skin again. It’s haunted her for her entire life and now it’s back. Burning her alive.

“Rey.” He prods. “He needs a name.”

“No.” She whispers. Fire stares back at him. Fire and 7,227 days of waiting. “It doesn’t.”

* * *

 

So they call him nothing.

It’s not difficult for them, despite the frustration it instills in Hux. He hates the namelessness. The unknowing. The wait for Rey as she secludes herself away. She sleeps years. Lost in the grey and dusk of their bedroom. A ghost in their own home. She doesn’t coo, doesn’t feed, doesn’t swoon. Rey simply sleeps, waking only to whisper selfish wants for water in the middle of the night when Hux finally joins her.

Ren is lost to him too.

Lost in the shallow pools of their son’s eyes. Lost in the quiet breaths. The molding of the boy fitting perfectly into his arms. Ren is transformed in the reflection something he once was. He’s Ben Solo once more; unbroken, untainted, full and free.

He coos, feeds, swoons. Enough for all three of them maybe. _Four of them._

Hux hovers on the edge of the carpets and watches Ben Solo smile, laugh, press kisses to a happy child and feels like he is watching a planet from below a viewport. Distant and far.

“The boy needs a name.” Hux says again.

Ben’s large nose tickles the puff of hair on the boy’s head. It’s silvery. Golden maybe. Trails of comets in the shadow of a pale, freckled moon.

“No, he doesn’t.” Ben smiles, makes noises. Little imitations of ships taking off, flying about their son like a trajectory of fleets flying around new space. “It’s not important.”

Hux thinks of Ben Solo. Of Kylo Ren. Skywalker. Vader. Organa. Amidala. Kenobi. Snoke.

Of Hux.

And disagrees.

But he can’t seem to cross the carpet. His boots are too shiny, too clean. And the boy is spittle and gunk. Flesh and life, cradling Ben’s big nose and laughing synthetic milk. A mess. A baby who will ruin Hux’s sleeves and unravel the threads of the First Order patch in his shoulder.

So he leaves the two of them there, gurgling happiness in their own solar system.

* * *

 

He tries to hide away with Rey. To sleep with her in the void. She’s gone to everyone, even him, as she lays there. She doesn’t ask for the boy, doesn’t care to, and Hux takes reprieve in that. They sleep alone, together. And Ben never joins them. Never comes in with a cradled arm and a soft voice.

But he spends the hours she sleeps, awake, wondering what the color of the boy’s eyes are in the other room. Hux has not been close enough to know. And he wonders if the boy might be too small. If he has ten fingers and toes. If he is well.

So Hux finds himself ghosting plastisteel hallways, carefully, still completely in uniform. He spies in the small rooms of their tiny house, pressing himself to a soldier’s attention against walls to listen.

He listens to Ben coo and sing. Listens to the soft hushes, the quiet whispers.

“Papa.” Ben says. “I’m papa.”

The boy smacks noises. Laughs. Papa.

Hux wonders if there is anything in the whole galaxy easier to say than that. Papa. It’s a simplicity Ben has stolen from him, because Father is much harder to say.

Ben curls up in that room. The boy’s room. Hux enters hours later, to find Ren, Ben, laid out on the small child’s bed. His legs and arms don’t fit, but he curls them up all the same, too perfectly molded to the baby pressed into his life to bother even trying to leave.

They fit perfectly. Oddly. And Hux wonders if there will be enough room for the three of them. _Four of them._

* * *

 

Hux watches Ben shift back and forth. A wavering tower in sunlight. A dark mass of a man, breezing easily with the bundle in his arms.

Sleep leaks off the wall of the house. From their bedroom, from the boy. It’s as if the cycles had stopped when the boy had birthed and there is nothing left to do but try to make time move again with slumber.

Hux is the only one who fights it. He sits, awake, at work, on the small pressed couches of their living room with a datapad in his lap. A faux business that is nothing but a registration form blinking back at him. Blank. Ready for a full, real, name.

The boy needs a name. Hux knows it and wants to remind them all for a third time.

But everyone’s asleep. And he can’t wake the boy as Ren rocks him.

Sunlight bursts from the room behind him and Rey appears. Time clicks back into place and the boy wakes up enough to cry, short and loud. She doesn’t notice. Doesn’t look at the boy, at Ben, Kylo, or Hux. She is streaked with sleep and sweat and something calls to her that none of them can see. Rey leaves the house and Kylo Ren goes after her, stopping only so Ben Solo can hand the boy off to Hux.

It’s mortifying.

The boy is crying, screaming. The datapad crashes to the floor, his uniform bends, wrinkles. The boy is placed into his arms and Hux doesn’t want it. Doesn’t want this because he's not made for it. He’ll fail.

“Hold his head up.”

But the baby hasn’t left his papa’s arms since he was born. And he screams when he’s parted from a place he’s supposed to be. Made to be.

“Ren, no--”

But Ben is gone. Kylo is gone. And Rey has been gone.

The boy cries. Red faced, slicked wet. His smooth skin yellows with anger. The silver of the small hair fades to obscurity and Hux cannot tell the color of his son’s eyes because they are closed in unhappiness.

Hux stands, sits. Stands again to pace. To rock like a tower as Ben had. He has listened, spied, enough that he remembers the noises. The sounds of space ships and blasters. The songs.

So Hux coos, feeds, swoons. But the boy screams, louder than Hux can sing or sweet talk. And every rank of his title slowly breaks off his uniform. Admiral, General, Lieutenant, Sargent... One by one until he is nothing but a pre-prep school academy cadet, holding a screaming baby and failing. Failing.

It feels like hours. Days. And it’s Ben Solo who saves him. Tall and huge and bigger than Hux had ever realized before. Hux looks up at him like a 15yr old student, marked red. Incorrect, waiting for guidance.

Ben takes their son with a soft call. “It’s papa. Papa is here.”

The boy quiets. Gurgles. Papa.

Hux flees after that. Rey is in their bedroom again, and Ben's with the boy on the carpet while Hux escapes to a white flickering 'fresher. A sanctuary where he can run the sink water loud enough so no one can hear him cry.

* * *

 

The boy goes 2 full sun cycles without a name.

It’s not a problem between them. There is only one child in the house without a name. The other three have more than one, and they are never confused when the baby is spoken of. Because he’s not.

The registration form still sits empty though. And the name is now more important to Hux than the boy himself. Rey does not answer him the second time he reminds her and Ben does not hear him. And Hux is splitting at the seams because a name is all he has ever been. A name and a title and a purpose and he doesn’t want his son to be the mistake his lovers were. Nameless or ill-fitted in their names.

So in the wake of midnight, alone, he sits with the form at the table and scratches out the only options he has.

Rey is not a name for someone not left behind. And he will not give the one thing Rey owns completely to herself to someone else. Son or not.

Kylo Ren is not a name. It is a promise. One that does not need to be filled anymore.

Ben Solo has died. Hux will not put the burden of that death on the boy. Nor will he bestow the Skywalker legacy anymore fodder for it’s terrible curse.

So it lies between Brendol and Armitage.

A name from his mother and a name from his father respectively.

Brendol is his mother’s gift. A hopeful, stupid form of wish fulfillment to have the man she never actually could. Brendol is the first thing he recalls hearing. Soft and quiet. Spoken through the disturbing hum a hungry cantina. But it’s also the name Rey whispers when she is stretched thin beneath him, and the plea of mercy Kylo Ren prays when red flushes the Knight’s chest and cheeks. It is a soothing, easy thing. A shadow and a secret.

Armitage is his father’s correction. Another title. A fitting crown atop the head of someone more suited to carry out what was needed to be done. The means to make his own path. One to Order. Armitage is the band about his sleeve. Aurebesh embroidered onto gold filigree. A scripted name for a scripted world. One that Armitage Hux would write himself.

The decision lies in the boy’s eyes, Hux decides.

Large and Black like his papa, he would be Brendol.

Gold and Hungry like his mother, an Armitage.

He steals his son from the moonlight of his papa. He sneaks in, uniform the only hiss of sound as he plucks the boy away from mold of Ren’s arms, from the slumber of the house. Hux takes the boy to the sky and the stars. He needs light to see color, to see his eyes. And he needs space to drown the boy’s screams should Hux fail again. The boy is nothing in Hux’s arms and still under the spell of Ren’s perfect fathering, the boy just sleeps.

It is hard, standing in the wet grass, pushing at the cotton folds of the baby’s swaddle, to release the small arms. They are plush beneath the texture of Hux’s gloves and he takes a moment to drop the leather from his hands to the earth below, so he can feel his son for the first time.

The boy is warm, hot even, like his mother. Burnt and baking under a Jakku sun that will never leave them.

Hux marvels at the perfection of his genius under the moonlight, because it’s all there.

The golden lashes dusting black starry moles on tanned skin. An algorithm of genetics all tussled into the chaotic storm of chance. There’s a swell in him like pride that snuffs out under a humbling wave. Because with all his careful needles, charts, blueprints and oversight, he could not have imagined the perfection of it. The exact placement of freckles, of dimpled skin, and gradient hair is some sort of fate. Aligned stars. 

There are ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes. One nose. A mouth. An entire life. Perfection pieced together from three different puzzles.

Hux finally lets his finger try to press open an eyelid when the boy wakes.

His son doesn’t scream.

Hux stares back into eyes that do not crinkle in cry in anger, because they are his own. Glass. Mirrored pieces of himself reflecting moonlight, sunlight, and storms.

They are pale.

Colorless.

* * *

 

When Rey finally, truly wakes, she sits with Hux on the pressed cushions.

She is tired. Worn. She doesn’t coo, feed, or swoon. She folds into herself and pushes selfishly into Hux, demanding to be held, even as he holds their son instead.

Rey stares blankly at the baby in his arms, and listens to him talk. Hux does not make ship or blaster noises as Kylo does. He talks. Informatively. Like his son is already grown and perfect. Old. She takes refuge in that, because she can’t seem to understand a baby either.

Kylo find them and smiles, happy. He understands the best. Fatherhood has filled him in places once too dark to bear. He is aglow enough for all of them.

He tosses a datapad into Rey’s lap.

“Is that it then?”

Rey fumbles as time slowly leaks back into their lives. Things seem to speed up as she clicks on the digital screen and reads. Colorless aurebesh engraves itself in the hologram. “Silas Hux.”

Their son gurgles in Hux’s hands. Silas.

“What’s it from?” Rey asks, watching spit seep into the threads of a First Order patch. The uniform swaddles the boy’s legs and arms. An entire fleet and army encircle around him, hold him, keep formation of him.

“My mother’s maiden name.” They don’t ask Hux to explain this new secret, but he does anyway, carefully adjusting his hold. Careful of Silas' head. Of his bones. “She had brittle limbs and a weak heart. Childbirth killed her.”

They don’t apologize. Hux is not sorry for the words. Instead Ben sweeps down, large enough to loom over all three of them, all four of them, and kisses their heads. One at a time.

“Silas.” Rey says, reaching out to touch the fingers of her son for the first time. “I like him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to [brittlelimbs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs) who coined Silas' name. :)


End file.
